I have been working on a ASP.NET MVC application recently. This is my first real ASP.NET MVC application, previously I have only played with it. The transition from MonoRail is overall very smooth as they are so very similar, the only thing that I found painful was the WebForms view engine which feels clunky.

I like the MonoRail Brail engine because it allows for expressions in ${} syntax which severely decreases the usage of ugly <% %> tags that sometimes can make your templates hard to read. I was strongly considering using the ported Brail engine that exists in the MvcContrib project until I read Scott Hanselman's post about a view engine called Spark.

This is the view engine I have been looking for! I quickly downloaded the latest release, referenced the spark assembly from my MVC application and was testing it in a matter of minutes. After reading though the documentation I was able to convert all my WebForms views into spark views in just an hour (so far very small application with not many views).

I find this a lot easier to read and understand than the html/<% %>/C# tag soup that is sometimes hard to avoid with WebForms. I also think a view engine like this make more sense, because Spark is a view engine tailor made for only one thing, to generate html!

So if this is your cup of tea when it comes to view engines, try it out.